


My Sincere-ish Apologies

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5760514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ben Solo attempts to make amends with certain individuals: sort of. He’s still new to the whole apology process, or at least on the rusty side, but a knack for arts and crafts always comes in handy when you least expect it. Rey is only slightly alarmed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Sincere-ish Apologies

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to get this out while the SNL skit with Adam Driver was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and while the jokes were still funny to me (which is always a bad sign, but there you go).

…

He holds the paper pinched between his thumb and his forefinger, the way somebody might carry out a dead rat by its tail. Judging by that putrefied expression on Finn’s face, the comparison isn’t completely inapt.

“You got any idea what this is?”

Rey turns from a demure row of potted green daisies that she’s watering – residency regulations have forbid her from keeping carnivorous m’iiyooms in the compound’s dormitory – to take the paper from him. She turns it over twice, waves it under her nose, and lifts it up to the light like a color slide.

The card is maybe four inches long by three inches wide, its heavy paper some antiquated holdover from before the Galactic Empire. Its front is decorated in black and white geometric shapes, giving the overall impression of an eight-sided dice, and a metallic paint has been applied to its inside borders. It doesn’t appear to have been signed.

“It’s a card,” Rey states, offering it back to him. “Would you like me to read its mind?”

“Did you read what it _says,_ though?”

“You clearly have.” She folds both arms into her bell-shaped sleeves, a habit she’s picked up from spending so much time in the company of dead people. “What else can I tell you?”

Finn opens the card with a decisive snap, clicks his feet into a position of standing attention, clears his throat, and reads aloud:

 _“‘I am sincerely contrite over my initial labeling of your character,’_ ” he pronounces, quirking an eyebrow, “ _though in my defense it was accurate given both the context and your preceding actions._ _I would caution you against any further internecine animosities between us._ ”

Rey waits. 

Finn looks up at her, scratching absentmindedly at his throat. A burn scar pokes out from beneath his shirt collar.

“…You heard all that, at least, right? Because I don’t think I’m imagining it or anything. Please tell me I’m not.”

“I heard.” She glances towards a stack of holofiles beside her hammock – testimonies, interrogatories, a subpoena from the New Republic’s Supreme Court that is dated three months from today – and then purses her lips. “Do you know who could’ve sent it?”

“ _Do I know who could’ve_ – Rey, seriously. What other person on this military base talks like he’s got a swarm of itch-mites flying up his nose? I just wanted to know _why_.”  Finn slips the card into a back pocket, an odd choice given how there’s a perfectly serviceable garbage chute hatch right there in the corner. “Also, _‘sincerely’_ my ass. I feel like I’ve had my hand shaken by a dianoga.”

“And what does that feel like, exactly?”

“I have no idea. Probably a lot like getting a hand-made apology card from a parricidal Sith Lord.”

“He’s not a Sith Lord, Finn. There aren’t any of them left. Sno – Darth Plagueis was the last, and he’s the one who helped us kill him.”

“You know what I meant.”

…

Poe spots them from across the crowded mess hall, rises half-way off his bench in greeting, and waves a hand until Finn waves back. In his other hand, Poe holds a folded piece of paper.

“Say, did you or the General ever hear back about that insanity plea idea?” he asks, as Rey drops down beside him.  Finn takes the seat directly opposite them. “Because if you did, I think we’ve got Exhibit A right here.”

“No, the court rejected it. General Organa wanted to argue how it was all Plagueis’ work from the beginning.” Rey lines up her two perspiring water glasses, deciding which one to drink now and which to save for later. “But they said that if he really didn’t have a choice, he couldn’t have gotten us so much classified intelligence during those last six months of the war.”

“You could send them our old security tapes,” Finn offers. “We had to back up and archive the ones that recorded him destroying our equipment, so Sonn-Blas Corporation could replace the damages. I think they might’ve eventually cut us a break on our deductible…Aren’t you going to tell us what that says?”

Finn is busy crushing his biscuits into a fine powder before sprinkling them over his soup, so he has to point towards Poe’s card with an elbow. Finn also likes pouring forest honey onto his gukked eggs and eating sandwiches one ingredient at a time, which Rey supposes are both side-effects of living your whole life on those pasty gray stormtrooper ration blocks.

(She doesn’t pay much attention to flavor, herself, since she bolts everything down so quickly that the taste doesn’t register.)

Poe wipes his other hand on a pant leg and then unfolds the card for them to see.

“What, you think I could keep something this bizarre to myself for more than half an hour? Not a chance. I’m hanging it up in the break room when I get there.”

This one is colored orange and white, its corners rounded off by rough-edged but meticulous tearing to give it a vaguely circular shape. A polished black button has been stuck with defiant, pathological precision in its very center. The handwriting is thin and spiky and pressed deep into the paper, as though it’s caught in a sustained moment of tense hesitation.

 _“‘My long-held presumptions about your weak-mindedness have since been proven incorrect.”_ Poe pauses to take another noisy spoonful of soup. _“‘I find that your stubbornness compensates quite adequately.’_ Well. I’m fl– ow!”

Finn has reached across the table and given Poe a hard pinch in the forearm. 

“You feel that?”

“Yeah, thanks. Didn’t even need to ask.” Poe turns back towards Rey. “Cracked or not, I’m still glad they apparently aren’t giving him scissors yet.”

Finn arranges his salt and pepper shakers into goal posts. Rey takes a wadded piece of paper napkin and tries flicking it between them with her fingers. They’re conversing just below the level of shouts, which is what you have to do if you want to be heard in here. Rey thinks of it as a lively, contained chaos, like kernels popping in a pan.

“How’d you get that, anyway? I mean, who delivered it?”

“One of the prison guards. Real tight-lipped about it, too. I can see why.” Poe stares down into his bowl. “Have I ever told you guys about the time I crash-landed on Hoth?”

“Nope. I don’t think so.”

"All right, it was my third solo mission after I’d joined the Starfleet. They’d sent me out to see if there was anything left of the old Echo Base. Reconnaissance work, I guess – except I left my ship for too long and had all the fuel lines ice up, which meant I needed to send out a distress signal and then wait there like a stooge.” He drums his broad fingers. “The only reason I didn’t freeze to death was because some tauntaun found me and thought I was this, I don’t really know – this undersized, orphaned, orange and white baby.”

“Tauntauns aren’t exactly famous for their eyesight.”

“Good thing, too. It spent a whole day either sitting right on top of me or trying to stuff lichens into my mouth before the rescue team finally picked me up. Took me a month to wash the blubber smell out of my flight suit.”  

Rey and Finn exchange stiff, concerned glances. Poe gives the card a demonstrative shake.

“…So when I say this is the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, you’ll both know I’m not just shooting the breeze.”

…

Three days later, Rey marches down to the cell block where they’re keeping him and punches a five-digit security code into the keypad. One guard may look up, or give her a limp salute, but by now they’re all too accustomed to the sight of her for real formalities or honorifics.  

The door unlocks and slides back with a clean, cool swish. 

Rey steps through.  
  
Ben Solo sits at an alusteel desk, which he keeps surgically clean and has requested be bolted to the floor so that he won’t throw it against the wall in a transport of rage. His long-toed, bony feet are bare, his moppish black hair in desperate need of a trim – he keeps his face smooth-shaven, though, because apparently a beard will not grow evenly around the scar – and he has his head bent so low over a paper that his nose is almost touching it.

His sleeves are also rolled up past his elbows, probably to prevent anything from smudging the ink. Rey is still so accustomed to seeing him swathed in yards of black cloth and armor that she’s practically scandalized.

“You’ve got an odd sense of humor, you know,” she says. 

“Are you admitting I have one, then, Master Kenobi?” He straightens up to study her. “I believe one of our previous conversations ended with you calling me a humorless – what was that term you used? I’ve forgotten.”

Rey’s mind reaches out and slaps the cell door closed behind her, because she can hear a guard starting to snicker.

 “I called you an arsemongering knob.”

“Ah. And thus my parlance is that much richer.”

“Well, you try getting your basic education from a bunch of freeloading scavengers and Outer Rim bar flies, sometime. See what you can say by the end.”  

“I’m sure it would be an experience.” His eyes have remained hard and unsmiling. He’s sitting back from the desk now, so Rey notes that he’s drawing something – a tree, of all things, its branches bare, done in quick and angry strokes as though he’s determined to fill up the whole paper. “But you didn’t come all this way just to expand my vocabulary.”

“No. I want to know if this –” Rey gestures towards the pen and paper “– is your idea of a joke. The cards.”

“I assume Commander Dameron and FN –” he halts. “Finn. I assume they were both duly surprised?”

“That’s not exactly the word I’d use. Do you seriously believe it’s going to make anything better, or will this just be part of some testament to your good behavior once they finally put you on trial?”

“I have no intention of asking for legal pardon from anybody. If the Supreme Court members have a single complete brain between them, they’ll make an exception to that foolish subsection in the Rights of Sentience Clause.”

(Rey knows what he’s talking about, of course. The Galactic Constitution, Article Ten, Section Four:

 _“No sentient being shall be subjected to any act which intentionally causes pain, suffering, or death, up to and including the use of capital punishment in retribution for crimes committed.”_ )

“Then why are you doing it?”

“It provides a certain appreciated distraction from other things. That’s what I told the General, when I requested the supplies.” With hesitating, arch hands, Ben slides something out from underneath the paper he’s working on. “And they are your friends.”

“How is that relevant to anything?”

“If you feel a need to ask, I see no reason to tell you.”

His eyes are flat and hooded, but now a corner of his mouth quirks up when he offers her a card. She accepts it, though she is careful to take it pinched between her thumb and her forefinger.

(And even if Rey wanted to see it, she wouldn’t dare look into his mind here – she never goes in without asking, first, without something that has become oddly like a knock on the door, because he has already lived with an unwelcome guest in his head for fifteen years and the forced eviction nearly killed him.

Rey knows this, of course, because she watched it happen from the inside. She helped him do it.)

“Huh.” 

It’s drawn in green, with scrollwork that looks like vines spanning up and down its borders. It is about the fourth gift Rey has ever gotten from another person and is easily the single most asinine, pathetic, unsettling, attentively and carefully-made thing she’s ever seen.

And maybe she would read this, instead of his mind – but Rey received her education from freeloading scavengers and bar flies from the age of six and onward, after all, and any paper that wasn’t money didn’t carry much value on Jakku, so the words just are tidily-written and incomprehensible symbols when she looks at them.  

“Thanks.” 

Then she drops it into a pocket without a second glance and leaves. He doesn’t say anything else.

…

Later, between one obligation and the next, Rey crouches down in front of the droid she uses for converting holofile texts into audio recordings. 

She switches two wires, screws a panel on again, holds the card up – upside down, at first, in her fumbling distraction – and then blinks rapidly as the bright blue light scans it.

A voice fills her room.

 _“I am still partially convinced that you are wasting your potential,”_ it says, _“and I have spent time in the presence of bounty-priced smugglers with both better language and table etiquette than you possess._

_Nonetheless, I do not find your company wholly repugnant and am very glad I never succeeded in killing you –  truthfully, you should know that I never tried in earnest.”_

The voice fades. 

Rey sits there in the darkened room, and then she gets up and slides the card under a flowerpot for safekeeping.

“Knob,” she repeats. 

…


End file.
